Monday, August 08, 2016

Crashing out of the Olympics

Finally got 5 minutes to watch some of the Rio Olympics yesterday, the whole family installed itself on the sofa to watch the cycling, only to (almost immediately) see a horrific crash and some poor Dutch lady (who was leading at the time) plough into a sharp concrete curb head first and bounce like a dead cat. She was clearly unconscious but her condition wasn't reported on for several hours, it was hard not to think the worst. I read today that she suffered a few fractures and a concussion but should recover, very lucky. I can't help thinking that the road course, particularly the descent where she crashed was pretty dangerous, not because of the gradient (I'm sure there's much worse on the Alpine sections of the Tour de France) but because of the lack of anywhere safe (i.e. without sharp pointy things) to bail out if it all goes wrong. I'm sure there will be much discussion among the health and safety bigwigs about this over the coming days and weeks. As for watching other events, we found that we couldn't really get into anything (lots of channel hopping) and the kids eventually wandered off, it's strange that the London games had us all glued to the TV non-stop but for some reason this time the allure isn't anywhere near as strong.